Dessert
Kladdkaka (Sticky Chocolate Cake with No Leavening)
The Swedish chocolate cake pulled from the oven while the middle is still batter. No baking powder, no yeast, and the butter is melted rather than creamed, so there is no whipped air either. Nothing lifts it at all, and that is the cake rather than a fault in it. The story goes that it began in 1938, when baking powder was hard to come by in Sweden and an American brownie recipe was made without it.
Black Forest Cake (Chocolate Sponge, Sour Cherries and Kirsch)
Three sheets of cocoa sponge brushed with kirsch, layered with sour Morello cherries and whipped cream, and covered in shaved chocolate. The kirsch goes onto a sponge that is already baked and meets no heat after that, so the raw edge of the spirit staying in the cake is the design rather than a fault.
Bingfen (Chilled Ice Jelly with Brown Sugar)
A summer jelly from southwest China, set from the mucilage rubbed out of plant seeds in cold water with a pinch of slaked lime. Nothing in it is heated at any stage; it is served cold under brown sugar syrup with whatever toppings the stall has.
Basi (Sweet Potato in a Molten Sugar Shell)
Sweet potato fried, then turned in sugar melted in oil — a sweet course from northern China. The name 拔丝 means "pulling silk", and the thread that follows a piece off the plate is not a garnish but the signal that the sugar is ready. Because the sugar is melted over oil rather than dissolved in water, there is no water to drive off at any stage, and the setting is done at the table by the person eating, in a bowl of cold water.
Kama (Roasted Grain Flour Whipped with Kefir)
Estonia's grain flour and the dessert made from it: barley, rye, oat and pea roasted whole, then milled, then whisked into kefir until it holds soft peaks. The point of the flour is that it has already been cooked. Its starch is dextrinised before it is ever milled, so it hydrates in cold liquid and needs no oven at any stage — which is why it was carried on journeys. Dasik uses roasted flour too, but binds it with honey and the pressure of a mould; here the liquid is the binder.
Summer Pudding (Bread-Lined Mould of Soft Fruit)
An English dessert: a basin lined with stale white bread, filled with barely-heated soft fruit and its juice, weighted, and turned out the next day. There is no gelatine, no egg and no starch in it, and the bread is never baked. It stands up on the plate because bread swollen with juice, held under a weight, loses the seams between the slices. Nothing is added to set it, and the overnight wait is not resting -- it is the cooking.
Nata de Coco (Fermented Coconut Jelly)
The Filipino sweet in which coconut water is fermented into a jelly. Every ferment on this site transforms a substrate — the cabbage in kimchi is still cabbage, the beans in miso are still beans, and the beans in tempeh are knitted together by hyphae but they are still beans. Nata de coco is the one where that is not true. Bacteria eat the sugar in coconut water and excrete cellulose, and the cellulose piles up at the surface as a mat. What you eat is the cellulose the bacteria built; the coconut water was fuel and is gone.
Medovik (Honey Layer Cake)
The Russian cake of eight to twelve wafer-thin honey layers stacked with soured cream. This site’s Irish soda bread is a page about not having any time: the acid meets the base and the clock starts, so it is mixed, gathered and into the oven inside two minutes. Medovik runs the same reaction deliberately to completion in a pan, before any flour is in it at all. Honey is acidic, bicarbonate of soda meets that acid over heat, and the mass foams up to twice its volume while you watch. With the leavening spent in advance, everything after it can take as long as it likes.
Pişmaniye (Floss Halva)
The Turkish confection of fine sugar threads, made by folding a sugar syrup together with butter-roasted flour. The shaobing page on this site says there are two ways to keep layers apart and cold is only one of them. This is a third, and the only one where the layers are not dough but sugar. Every fold doubles the count — the arithmetic Lanzhou lamian does with noodles, and yeot already does with sugar. But what sits between yeot’s layers is air, so it turns white; what sits between these is roasted flour and butter, so the layers cannot weld back together. That is the difference between one pulled candy and several thousand threads.
Koldskål (Cold Buttermilk Bowl)
The Danish summer bowl, and the name means exactly that: cold bowl. Every custard on this site is set or thickened by heat — crème brûlée sets with yolk alone, crème caramel stands up because the whites are in it, blanquette de veau stops just short of setting. Koldskål never meets heat at all, so that method is simply unavailable, and three things stand in for it: the acidity the buttermilk was cultured to, sugar dissolved into raw yolk, and the fridge. Which makes the order of addition the hard part — yolk dropped into cold acidic buttermilk seizes into threads instead of dispersing.
Canelé (Beeswax-Lined Mould, Burnt Crust, Custard Middle)
The little cake of Bordeaux, and the only recipe on this site with beeswax in the ingredient list. The batter is not a cake batter but nearly a crêpe batter, and it rests a day or two in the fridge. That liquid batter goes into a copper mould lined with wax and butter and bakes at 250°C until the outside is very nearly burnt. Where browning and Maillard treats a scorched surface as failure, a canelé aims at it — and while that thick shell forms, the inside stays a barely-set custard. The wax is what makes it possible: at that temperature it does not burn the way butter would, it lacquers the crust hard, and it lets the thing come out of the mould.
Jeungpyeon (Rice Cake Leavened with Makgeolli)
The summer rice cake made by fermenting non-glutinous rice flour with makgeolli, and the only tteok on this site that rises. Fermentation basics explains a ferment as an acidity crash — lactic bacteria turn sugar into acid and the falling pH keeps spoilage out — and in jeungpyeon that acid is the by-product. What is wanted is the carbon dioxide the yeast gives off. And for that gas to be trapped at all it has to be a pourable batter rather than a dough: rice flour has no gluten, so there is no network to hold bubbles, and what holds them instead is starch setting around them as it steams. Which is why this is the one tteok nobody kneads.
Spotted Dick (Suet Pudding Steamed in a Basin)
The British steamed pudding, and the only dish on this site built on the highest-melting fat in the kitchen. A croissant needs its butter kept cold so it never melts in, and shortbread is held together by butter that has set hard again. Suet is the fat from around a bullock's kidneys and it does not start to melt until 45-50°C, more than fifteen degrees above butter — so through two hours in a steamer that never passes 100°C, the batter sets first and only then does the fat run out of it. The holes it leaves behind are the light open crumb. Swap in butter and it melts in the first few minutes, and the pudding comes out dense.
Île Flottante (Poached Meringue Floating on Custard)
The French dessert, and the fourth thing this site does with a meringue. The soufflé page counts three ways of handling a whipped foam: chocolate mousse preserves it by chilling, dobos torte bakes it into permanent structure, and a soufflé bakes it and it still never becomes permanent. This one poaches it. Floated on milk at 80°C the surface sets in about two minutes and the shape is fixed, with no oven and no drying anywhere. Under it goes crème anglaise, the stirred custard this site did not have — and it wants the exact opposite of the meringue, because the moment it boils it is finished.
Biscotti di Prato (Cantucci)
The almond biscuit of Prato in Tuscany. The name is the Latin biscoctus, twice-cooked: baked once as a log, sliced, and baked again. The point is that the second bake is not cooking but drying — the loaf is already done after the first one, and the second exists only to drive water out through the newly cut faces. That is why they keep for months, and it is why the traditional recipe has no butter, no oil and no milk in it at all. The absence of fat is not an omission; it is the condition for keeping.
Crème Caramel (Baked Custard Turned Out in Its Own Caramel)
The French custard baked over a layer of caramel and turned out onto a plate. Two things decide it. Because it has to stand up unsupported once it leaves the mould it is made with whole eggs, not the yolks alone that go into crème brûlée — egg white sets firmer than yolk. And the caramel, poured in and set hard as glass, spends the night pulling water out of the custard and turning back into a syrup. No sauce is made: waiting is how the sauce gets made.
Barfi (Reduced-Milk Fudge)
The Indian sweet made by stirring milk down for hours and then setting it. Every sugar confection on this site so far works at stopping crystals from forming — lokum with invert sugar, nougat with glucose and honey, tanghulu by driving out all the water. Barfi wants crystals, and wants them very small. How you stir it as it cools decides how big they get, and that size is the texture of the sweet.
Chocolate Truffle (Ganache Rolled in Cocoa)
The French confection: hot cream poured onto chocolate, set, rolled and dusted with cocoa. A ganache is an emulsion that sets rather than pours, and nothing was added to hold it — the chocolate's own lecithin and cocoa particles do that. And one number decides what you get from the same operation: 2:1 chocolate to cream gives a truffle you can roll, 1:1 a glaze you pour, 1:2 a sauce.
Genoise (Whole-Egg Sponge)
A sponge cake with no raising agent at all, aerated by whipping whole eggs. Every other cake on this site either whips whites alone or creams solid butter; a whole egg is about a third yolk by weight, and the fat in that yolk gets into the bubble walls and breaks them, so cold whole egg barely foams. That is why the eggs and sugar are warmed to 40-45°C over a water bath before whipping. One page here performs that step as a procedure; the reason is in the cooking-eggs guide.
Nougat (Honey and Egg-White Confection with Almonds)
The honey-and-egg-white confection of southern France. Every other sugar recipe on this site boils a syrup to a target and then does something with it: coats fruit, casts a sheet, stirs it into starch, pours it into whites and stops. Nougat goes on cooking after the pouring. The aerated mass is beaten for another twenty to thirty minutes to drive water out of it, and doneness is judged by dropping a sample into cold water rather than by a clock. Where you stop is the recipe: 135°C gives soft nougat, 145-150°C gives the hard kind.
Pineapple Cake (Fenglisu)
Taiwan's signature gift confection — and the filling in a traditional one is mostly winter melon rather than pineapple. Cooked down on its own, pineapple stays fibrous and sharply sour and gives off juice in the oven that soaks the pastry under it; winter melon tastes of almost nothing but reduces to something soft and stiff enough to hold a cube. The pineapple goes in for aroma. All-pineapple filling is the more recent revival, and it has a name of its own.
Krumkake (Cone Wafer Cookie)
The Norwegian wafer baked thin in a patterned iron and rolled around a cone while it is still hot. The trick is not in the batter but in the timing: a wafer off the iron stays pliable for about ten seconds and then sets like glass, and bending it after that shatters it. So the cone has to be in your hand before the wafer comes off, and you can only bake one at a time. Nothing in it leavens anything — the thinness and the iron do all the work.
Dasik (Pressed Honey Confection)
The Korean confection served with tea, and the only one on this site made with neither water nor heat — so the whole question is where its solidity comes from. Baekseolgi sieves rice flour into a mould and lets steam gelatinise the starch so the particles weld together. Dasik has no steam, so the only thing binding it is honey, and the rest is the pressure of the carved mould. That is why the flour has to be roasted beforehand, why it has to be sieved very fine, and why there is almost no margin in how much honey goes in.
Sfogliatella (Layered Shell Pastry)
Naples' shell-shaped pastry. Roti canai names three ways of building layers into a dough on its own page — a croissant folds butter in, an apple strudel stretches and wraps once, and roti canai coils a stretched sheet into a spiral and presses it flat. Add the oil paste of a shaobing and there are four, and in all four the layers end up lying parallel to the surface. This one does not: the stretched sheet is smeared with lard and rolled into a log, and then the log is cut across rather than pressed, so each disc is a spiral seen end-on that splays into a cone of layers standing on edge. That is why it shatters into leaves instead of separating into sheets.
Chiffon Cake
The American foam cake made with oil instead of butter. That one substitution decides everything: oil does not solidify at room temperature, so a chiffon stays soft straight out of the fridge where a butter cake goes firm. But oil cannot hold air the way creamed butter does, so the whipped whites carry all of it — and the tin must be left ungreased, because the batter has to climb the sides. Out of the oven it hangs upside down to cool.
Nanaimo Bar (Three-Layer Chocolate Slice)
The Canadian three-layer slice that never sees an oven. Its structure is that each layer is held by a different fat: cooked egg and butter glue the crumb base, butter carrying icing sugar sets the middle firm at fridge temperature, and the cocoa butter in the chocolate crystallises into the top. Why that top shatters the moment a knife touches it — and why the butter stirred into it is structural rather than richness — is what this page is about.
Leche Frita (Fried Milk Squares)
A dessert from northern Spain whose name means "fried milk". There is not one egg in it: starch alone sets the milk, and that decides everything. A starch gel is firm enough to take a knife when cold and loosens again when hot — so it can be chilled hard, cut into squares, and then fried for thirty seconds until the outside is crisp and the inside has gone back to being milk. Warm, it cannot be cut at all.
Linzer Torte (Hazelnut Pastry Tart with a Lattice of Jam)
The latticed jam tart of Linz, and the oldest cake for which a written recipe survives. The whole of the dough is that a third of the flour is replaced by ground hazelnuts. That removes gluten, and the oil inside the nuts gets between what gluten is left and shortens it further. The result is too soft to lift in one sheet, which is why the top is a lattice: not decoration, but the only way that dough can be got over the jam.
Baekseolgi (Steamed White Rice Cake)
The plain white steamed rice cake made for a baby’s twenty-first day and hundredth day, and the whole of it is that there is no dough. Nothing is kneaded and nothing binds it. Moistened rice flour is rubbed through a sieve twice, piled into a mould and steamed, and the steam gelatinises the starch where it lies so that the particles weld wherever they touch. Songpyeon kneads a boiling-water dough and daifuku beats one; baekseolgi gets all of its cohesion from steam. Which is why sieving is not about removing lumps — it is how the water is distributed.
Clafoutis (Cherries Baked in a Thin Custard Batter)
A dessert from the Limousin: cherries laid in a dish and a thin batter poured over them. By its ingredients it is the same custard as crème brûlée — eggs, milk, sugar — and yet it goes into a 180°C oven with no water bath and does not curdle. The difference is a handful of flour. The crème brûlée page says of itself that there is "no gelatine and no flour holding it together, so once it goes past its setting temperature there is no way back". Here swollen starch granules sit between the egg proteins and raise the temperature at which they set.
Daifuku (Soft Mochi Wrapped Around Sweet Red Bean Paste)
A Japanese sweet: red bean paste wrapped in a thin skin of glutinous rice. Two pages on this site already assert that glutinous rice flour is stretchier and stales differently — dango and songpyeon both say so and neither says why. The answer is one number. Ordinary short-grain rice starch is about 17 per cent amylose; glutinous rice has almost none. Amylose is the straight molecule that recrystallises quickly, and branched amylopectin cannot pack the same way. That is why mochi stretches, and why it is still soft the next morning.
Douhua (Silken Soy Curd Set with Gypsum)
The silken soy curd eaten across the Chinese-speaking world: fresh soy milk, one pour of coagulant, and then nothing. The one recipe on this site that curdles dairy on purpose is rasgulla, and that uses acid to make curds you lift out. Douhua uses a calcium salt instead, and the difference is structural: calcium ions bridge between soy proteins and set the whole pot as a single gel, so there are no curds to lift — the soy milk becomes a pudding where it stands. Which is why, once it is poured, you do not touch it.
Lokum (Turkish Delight, a Starch-and-Sugar Gel)
A Turkish confection: sugar syrup and cornflour stirred together for over an hour until it sets into something that cuts with a knife and chews rather than shatters. At this sugar concentration a syrup will crystallise given the chance, and grainy lokum is the commonest failure. The acid from lemon juice or cream of tartar splits some of the sucrose into glucose and fructose — invert sugar — whose different molecular shapes cannot pack into a crystal lattice. It is the exact opposite intention to tanghulu, which drives sugar to glass on purpose.
Mille-feuille (Puff Pastry Layered with Pastry Cream)
Three sheets of baked puff pastry with pastry cream between them and fondant on top. Puff pastry has no yeast in it: the only thing lifting it is water in the butter layers turning to steam. Left alone it triples in height, and unevenly. A mille-feuille is the one pastry that stops that on purpose — the dough is docked all over and baked with a tray on top of it, so the layers all stay and the height comes down to about a third. It has to be a thing you can cut.
Poire Belle Hélène (Poached Pear with Chocolate Sauce and Vanilla Ice Cream)
Pears poached in sugar syrup, served with vanilla ice cream and hot chocolate sauce — Escoffier’s composition of about 1864, named after Offenbach’s operetta. The point of it is that the pears go into syrup and not into water. In plain water, water leaves the pear’s cells and pectin dissolves out of the walls, and twenty minutes turns it to mush; in a syrup sweeter than the fruit, that flow all but stops. Same time on the heat, and one of them collapses while the other comes out firm enough to cut.
Cannolo (Sicilian Fried Shell with Sweetened Ricotta)
Sicily’s fried tube filled with sweetened ricotta. The site already had two hollow shells: an éclair is hollow because steam pushed it out from inside, and a youtiao because a void opened between two strips pressed together. A cannolo is the third way. The dough is wrapped around a metal tube and fried, so the tube holds the shape while the dough sets. Nothing puffs and nothing separates — it was a tube from the start and stays one. Which makes the most important piece of equipment here neither an oven nor a pan but a length of steel pipe.
Yōkan (Agar-Set Red Bean Confection)
The Japanese confection of sweet bean paste set with sugar and agar, firm enough to cut with a knife. This site had three setting agents — gelatine in panna cotta, collagen in pyeonyuk, starch in dotori-muk. Agar is a fourth, and it behaves as the opposite of gelatine. It sets at around 40C and does not melt until past 85C, so a piece holds its shape in your hand and does not melt in the mouth. Gelatine must never be boiled; agar must be boiled. That is the other way round too.
Tarte Tatin (Upside-Down Caramelised Apple Tart)
The upside-down apple tart of the Centre of France: apples laid on caramel, pastry over the top, baked, and the whole thing turned out. Being back to front is the point. An ordinary tart has a base that must survive a wet filling, which is why shells get blind-baked or waterproofed. This one removes the problem instead — the pastry is a lid, it never touches liquid and bakes in dry oven air, and the apples have already given up their water into the caramel before the oven.
Baumkuchen (Layered Tree Cake)
A German cake built one layer at a time: spread a thin film of batter, brown it under direct heat, spread the next layer straight onto the browned one, and repeat a dozen times or more. That is why a cut face shows tree rings, and it is also why it tastes different. An ordinary cake browns on its crust and nowhere else; here you are eating a dozen browned surfaces at once.
Key Lime Pie (Acid-Set Lime Custard in a Crumb Crust)
A pie from the Florida Keys: condensed milk and egg yolks with lime juice poured in, set in a crumb crust under meringue. The filling is not thickened by cooking. The moment the juice goes in, the acid coagulates the proteins in the condensed milk and it thickens on the spot; the oven is there to bring the yolks to a safe temperature and to bake the meringue. Condensed milk was the starting point because fresh milk did not reach the islands before refrigerated shipping.
Galaktoboureko (Semolina Custard in Filo)
A Greek pastry: a stiff semolina custard baked between sheets of filo, then soaked in cold syrup. What makes the custard unusual is the semolina. A custard set with starch or egg is something you spoon; semolina swells grain by grain and sets so firm that once cold you can cut it with a knife — which is why a slice holds its shape instead of running out.
Bündner Nusstorte (Sealed Caramel Walnut Tart)
A tart from Graubünden in Switzerland: caramelised walnuts sealed completely between two layers of pastry. The trick is all in the caramel. Sugar melted on its own sets like glass when it cools, but pour warm cream into it and the added water and fat keep it soft. Cold cream seizes it into a lump on contact, which is the one trap in the recipe.
Umm Ali (Pastry Pudding with Nuts)
An Egyptian dessert: pastry baked until brittle, broken up and layered with nuts, then drowned in hot milk and baked again. The name is Arabic for the mother of Ali. There is really only one technique in it, which is drying the pastry out completely first. Only something dry takes up hot milk and still holds its layers; anything underbaked turns to paste the moment the milk touches it.
Rasgulla (Chhena Balls Boiled in Syrup)
An eastern Indian sweet: milk curdled with acid, the fresh curd kneaded into balls and boiled in a thin sugar syrup. Almost everywhere else on this site curdling is the failure you are trying to avoid; here it is step one. Acid is what gives you a curd to lift out and shape at all. And unlike almost every other syrup sweet the balls are not soaked but cooked in the syrup, which is what makes them swell to double and take it right through.
Éclair (Choux Pastry with Cream Filling)
A French pastry: choux paste piped in lengths, baked, filled with cream and glazed with chocolate. There is no raising agent in it at all. The only thing lifting it is the water in the paste turning to steam and pushing outwards, and the shell has to set hard enough to hold that shape before the steam runs out — which is how the inside ends up hollow. Opening the oven door mid-bake is the surest way to kill one.
Prinsesstårta (Marzipan-Domed Cream Cake)
A Swedish cake: sponge, jam and custard under a tall dome of whipped cream, sheeted over in pale green marzipan. What decides this cake is not the half minute when the marzipan goes on but the step before it. The cream dome has to be chilled genuinely firm for the marzipan to settle taut over it; on soft cream even a perfectly rolled sheet wrinkles and slides.
Gelato (Slow-Churned Milk Ice)
The Italian frozen dessert, built on milk rather than cream and churned slowly. What separates it from ice cream is not the ingredients but three numbers: less fat, less air, and a warmer serving temperature. None of the three works alone. Cutting the fat is what sharpens the flavour, that makes it harder, so less air goes in and density carries it instead, and it is served warmer so that dense low-fat mixture is still soft enough to scoop.
Dobos Torte (Layered Sponge with a Caramel Top)
A Hungarian cake: six thin sponge discs stacked with chocolate buttercream and finished with a sheet of caramel on top. The decisive moment lasts about half a minute after the caramel is poured. It has to be scored into twelve wedges with a buttered knife while it is still plastic, and if you miss that window, putting a knife to it later is not cutting but shattering.
Baklava (Layered Filo Pastry with Nuts and Syrup)
The Turkish pastry: dozens of paper-thin filo sheets stacked with chopped nuts between them, baked, and then flooded with sugar syrup. Almost every failure happens at that last line. Hot pastry takes cold syrup, cold pastry takes hot syrup — one or the other, never both hot. Both hot and the layers simply drink it and you have a soggy slab instead of a crisp one.
Lamington (Coconut Chocolate Sponge Squares)
The Australian teatime square: butter sponge cut into cubes, dipped in a thin chocolate icing and rolled in desiccated coconut. Simple ingredients, simple method, and almost every failure happens in the same place. Cake baked that morning falls apart at the corners the moment it meets the icing. This is a recipe built around day-old cake, and the staleness is a requirement, not a compromise.
Pound Cake
The English cake named after its formula: a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, all the same weight. Four ingredients and no raising agent, so the only thing lifting it is air beaten into the butter and sugar. That process, creaming, is the whole of this batter, and a pound cake that fails has almost always failed there before it ever reaches the oven.
Monaka (Crisp Rice Wafers with Bean Paste)
A Japanese confection: sweet bean paste between two thin, crisp shells. The shells are not a flour wafer but glutinous rice dough rolled paper-thin and puffed in a hot iron mould, which is why they taste of rice. The problem the whole thing turns on is that moisture moves out of the paste into the shell and softens it within hours — answered by cooking the paste drier than you otherwise would, and by filling the shells only when you are about to eat.
Red Velvet Cake
The American southern cake with the red crumb and cream cheese frosting. It is easy to assume the colour is only dye, but the original red came from non-alkalised cocoa reacting with buttermilk and vinegar. Use the Dutch-processed cocoa that is now standard and that reaction does not happen at all, leaving something that is not quite a chocolate cake either. Which cocoa you buy is the first fork in the road here.
Halo-halo (Shaved Ice with Preserves)
The Filipino summer dessert: a dozen sweetened components in the bottom of a glass, finely shaved ice heaped over them, evaporated milk poured on top. There is almost nothing to cook, so the order is the whole technique — the heavy things go in first and the ice last, or the spoon never reaches them. The name means "mix", which makes those neat layers an instruction rather than a finished state.
Mooncake (Lotus Paste and Salted Egg Yolk)
The Cantonese mooncake shared at the Mid-Autumn Festival: a thin pastry shell around white lotus paste with a salted duck egg yolk at its centre. On the day it is baked it is hard and dry and looks like a failure. Sealed in a box for two or three days, oil migrates out of the filling into the shell and it turns soft and glossy — miss that resting stage and no amount of following the recipe tells you whether it worked.
Apfelstrudel (Apple Strudel in Hand-Stretched Dough)
A Viennese dessert: dough stretched thin by hand, filled with apple and rolled. What the dish is comes down to that dough — not puff pastry with butter folded into it, but a high-gluten dough rested and then pulled over the backs of your hands until you can read newsprint through it. Versions made with shop-bought puff pastry are also called strudel, but they are closer to a different food.
Sachertorte (Chocolate Cake with Apricot Jam and Poured Glaze)
The Viennese cake: chocolate sponge with a layer of apricot jam, finished with a glaze of chocolate melted into boiled sugar syrup and poured over in one go. The hard part is not the batter but the glaze — the glassy shine hangs on taking the syrup to 112°C and pouring at the right moment. Unsweetened whipped cream alongside is part of the recipe, not a garnish.
Tanghulu (Fruit Skewers in a Hard Sugar Shell)
Skewered fruit rolled in sugar syrup that sets glass-hard — Chinese street food. Two things have to be right, the syrup temperature and how dry the fruit is, and failure is almost always one of them.
Dango (Mitarashi Dango: Grilled Rice Dumplings in Soy Glaze)
Rice flour mixed with boiling water, boiled into dumplings, skewered, grilled and glazed with soy. The ratio of non-glutinous to glutinous flour decides the bite — all glutinous and what you have made is mochi, not dango.
Songpyeon (Half-Moon Rice Cakes with Sesame Filling)
The half-moon rice cakes made for Chuseok. Rice flour has no gluten, so cold water will not bring it together — the dough is made with boiling water, and the starch that gelatinises does the job gluten would. Songpyeon that cracks was almost always short of water or short of kneading.
The rest of this kind22
- Crème Brûlée (Baked Custard with a Burnt Sugar Crust)
- Macaron (Almond Meringue Sandwich)
- Doughnuts (Yeast-Raised Rings)
- Waffle (Brussels Style)
- Eton Mess
- Mango Sticky Rice
- Chocolate Mousse
- Apple Pie
- Brownies
- Basque Burnt Cheesecake
- Pavlova
- Banana Bread
- Panna Cotta
- Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Crepe
- Brigadeiro
- Churros
- French Toast (Pain Perdu)
- Cheesecake (New York-Style)
- Pastel de Nata (Egg Tart)
- Tiramisu
- Pancakes